After looking on the misery of eight hundred years of oppression over the last quarter and a
half, it is refreshing to see someone, anyone looking towards the future with an idea about a solution for the intractable Northern Ireland dilemma.
Kearney, being a professor of Philosophy writes in Postnationalist Ireland with a denseness we haven't experienced from any of the writers we
have read; he requires considerable unpacking, to use one of Ceorls metaphors. A slogan from Berkeley's postmodern periodical Mondo 2000
queries, "how dense are you; how fast?" I am out of breath trying to keep up with this man as he jumped about from the past of political history
to the future political philosophy of postmodernism. In discussing the Irish and confronting what 'Irishness' means, he manages to hit most of
the themes we have been working within this program: exile and boundaries, the marginal space between (either/or) oppositions traversed by
transposition, the agency of myth and language.
The cover is one of the more striking aspects of this book, a cruagh on the boundary between the water and land; the title Transpositions
suggests crossing those boundaries as well. The boundaries between competing nationalisms are an obstacle Kearney's postsoverign ideal
attempts to hurdle. " Traditional borders have become too large and too small: too large to cater for the growing sense of regional difference in
Europe, and too small to respond to the movement towards European integration." These divisions are contrived constructs and require us to
reimagine them in less competitive forms in order to facilitate the move towards cooperation in the 'global village'.
One of the ways in which the Irish have escaped the hand they have been dealt by 'Providence' is to fly past those boundaries; whether they are
imposed from within or from without, or worse yet both. Even though the emigrant is seen as exile in his homeland (a rather insular concept) the
Irish Diaspora suggests, especially in regards to the PBS series The Irish in America, you can take the Irish out of Ireland, but not Ireland out of
the Irish. "By reminding us of the many migrant minds which make up its heritage Irish culture reveals that the island of Ireland is without frontiers,
that is the surrounding seas are waterways connecting it with 'foreigners, that the navigatio towards the other presents the best possibility
of coming home to itself." I would say though that Irish dualism sees it as both boundary and connection simultaneously.
In fact this duality, when viewed through the Irish lens, points towards the neither/nor, the thin line where these dualities interact. Kearney uses
the ancient coiced ideal of the 'fifth province' to explicate this escape from the rhetoric of nationalism. The fifth province as described in
the Collins book is Meath or 'middle'; elsewhere it is simply the hill of Uisneach where the other four provinces meet. He suggests
this ideal of border/connection as the portal out of the sovereignty debate. "The fifth province is to be found ... at the swinging door which
connects the parish (Kavanaugh) with the cosmos." The 'father of Irish Philosophy' James Toland is a case study in this ambiguous neither/nor
ideal, "Protestant and Catholic, Planter and Gael, native-speaker and Englishspeaker, conformist and dissenter." He represents the man in the middle.
Another example of this boundary/connection concept was the Mobeius Strip, which Deirbhle used as analogous to the image of the gyre in the
Yeats poem 'The Second Coming'. I used this same image to illustrate the turning of milk-ties of kinship into the blood-ties of kingship as
illustrated in Condren. "Indeed it is highly ironic that republicanism was first introduced into Ireland by Cromwell in the guise of English
imperialism." In fact the whole concept of nationalism seems to be a twisting of these same regional ties into national allegiance in the act of
protection ... leading to further erosion of liberty. "A sense of national unity predicated upon the projection of inner hostilities onto some outer
adversary is ultimately condemned to fail. The ploy of demonizing others returns to plague the inventor."
Even though Carol and I had mentioned this in our presentations on Irish writers, I enjoyed Kearney reiterating the reservations Beckett and
Joyce had towards Yeats and the 'Celtic revival'. Having his discussion of the Irish poets who choose to use myth as Joyce did, in a more
cosmopolitan style; a style that does not idealize an Ireland which few can discuss with any certainty, further solidified our points about this
dichotomy. I was particularly struck by Kinsella's phrase "the 'divided mind' of a literature ghosted by the silence of a lost tongue." Kearney
himself adds, "Culture is not purity but fusion. Literature is not a continuum but a matter of 'singleminded swervings"'.
For numerous reasons I am optimistic that Kearney is on to something here; not just because all the political rumblings of the past few years
suggest we are moving towards this 'postnationalism' he suggests, but more importantly it seems the appropriate move as we enter the twenty
first century. Casting off the long held baggage of 'memories of hate', the desire for Old World solutions; the barrel of a gun or the trigger of a
bomb. One of the most hopeful signs that the European Union is headed in the right direction is the importance of two-way empowerment/governance;
up from the regional level and down from the transnational. It provides a platform for recognition of difference and much more importantly
recognition of the interconnectedness of the 'global village'. "To be truthful to ourselves, as Joyce put it, is to be 'othered': to exit from our own
time frame in order to return to it, enlarged and enriched by the detour. This signals a new attitude not only to culture to but to history." Or as
Joyce attempted to do with his own writings, "To Hibernicize Europe and Europeanize Ireland".